Wonkette

GOOD LORD: Here is the most tragic thing you’ll see today, “Foreclosure Alley,” from KCET in Southern California. Thanks to commenter qwerty42 for bumming us out. [KCET via Andrew Sullivan]

If you’re at work today — and screwing around on the Internet, as usual — then good for you! This means you aren’t one of the 159,000 people who lost their jobs last month. The number is “unexpectedly large,” and the monthly job-loss rate is the biggest seen for FIVE AND A HALF YEARS, which should help the McCain campaign. The official unemployment rate remains 6.1% and 760,000 non-farm full-time jobs have vanished so far this year. [Reuters/Marketwatch]

• DOW DROPS 348 TO THREE-YEAR LOW: Whoops. All the big indexes are down another 3%-4%. Even oil and gold lost big. Joblessness, manufacturing declines, basically everything is horrible, forever. [Bloomberg]

WE HAVEN’T HIT BOTTOM YET: “With a winning bid of just $1.75, a Chicago woman has won an auction for an abandoned home in Saginaw.” [AP/Yahoo]

Got $12 million burning a hole in your pockets? Need a new mansion in Arizona? How about this little place, one of John and Cindy McCain’s unwanted castles? MORE »

NPR is running this terrible phone interview with John McCain this morning. As the nutty old man says a lot of obnoxious nonsense punctuated by his hideous “heh heh” chuckles, you may be tempted to just turn off the radio and crash the car, for the sake of dignity. But go ahead and listen as he says this: “We’re in the most serious financial crisis of our, uh, ergh, lifetime.” Heh heh, McCain was born in 1936 — the middle of the Great Depression. MORE »

John McCain pissed off about a million Republican businessmen (and especially George Will) when he angrily pretended to fire Securities & Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox. Then the maverick idiot announced he wanted New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo — a famous Democrat who was even married to a Kennedy, once — to take over the SEC. Obviously, Cuomo directly caused the entire American economic collapse: “Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis.” [Village Voice]

The rich ladies of D.C. (and Northern Virginia) used to have fancy wine parties where they would buy fancy kitchen crap or $500 dildos or whatever, but now there is no money, for anything. This is why the fancy white women are now having “gold parties,” at which they sell whatever golden trinkets they can find in their monstrous foreclosed McMansions. “Suzy Senkus brought a bracelet given to her once upon a time by a handsome doctor, who then cheated on her with a nurse.” What a trashy nation. [Washington Post]

WHY DOES HITCHENS HATE AMERICA? “America is doomed. No one in this room will ever, in their lifetime, see calm and order and peace!” [Gawker]

Thanks to evil poor people who were kindly given expensive mortgages they couldn’t afford, U.S. home prices continue to plunge, and that means the financial apocalypse will continue, because every time another home loan defaults, another weird mortgage-based security is worth less, and there are 10,000 new foreclosures every day in the Country of Dreams. MORE »

You thought we were “joking” when we said invest in canned goods. Also, we never make jokes — who do you people think we are, John McCain? And then Campbell’s shares started to soar, and then the market collapsed in the biggest pool of blood since 1987, and guess who was left standing? Bloomberg reports: “The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index fell 8.4 percent, the most since Oct. 26, 1987, as only Campbell Soup Co. gained.” [Bloomberg]

• NUMBERS ARE FOR LOSERS: Oh well this is nice: after the Dow plummeted 600 points early this afternoon, it recovered most of those losses. And by that we mean CONTINUED TO PLUMMET HORRIBLY GAHHH. It’s down 770 777 points, which sounds eerily like a “record.” The S&P and Nasdaq are faring even worse, percentage-wise. Here’s a bonus “afternoon funny” for you to laugh at and then tell all yr work friends: the last time Congress swiftly passed a major, bipartisan piece of legislation was to authorize an idiot to launch the worst foreign policy decision in modern American history. So maybe things aren’t so bad hmm? [WSJ]

Well, shit. Fun while it lasted, right? For us, anyways — the elites who had the MacBooks and iPhones and flat-screen teevees and cars and hot water and, uh, food. Pretty much sucked for the other 5 billion, but whatever, it’s all academic now. Ha, not really, because there will be no more academics. Just fighting, fighting other people (and rats, mostly) for food. And then fighting over the rats, and the rotting corpses of the people. Fun Fact: Many societies turn to cannibalism once they’ve hit bottom! TO RECAP: Global sell-off, stocks plummeting worldwide, the NASDAQ dropped like 5% this morning, which is kind of incredible. MORE »